A Research On Applying Process-genre Approach In Writing Nstruction Of English Majors

EFL writing ability is one of the core skills emphasized in English language learning and teaching, so ithas attracted widespread attention in second language acquisition. As a complex productive andcommunicative skill, English writing is probably the most difficult of all the five macro-skills, namelylistening, speaking, reading, writing and translating; and that is particularly true of English majors who arespecially offered English writing courses from their second year. It has been over ten years sinceprocess-genre approach was introduced to China, and some researchers has done lots of research on it; mostof them, however, focus on teaching writing to non-English majors. As a result, this thesis, based on anexperimental study on the effectiveness of product approach and process-genre approach, aims to test whichof the two approaches is more effective in improving English majors’ EFL writing proficiency.The author firstly reviewed the related approaches of EFL Writing teaching, and introduced threeapproaches popular in English writing instruction, namely product approach, process approach and genreapproach. The product approach argues that successful writing is based on writers’ linguistic knowledge;therefore, it overemphasizes correct usage, correct grammar and correct spelling, but ignores thedevelopment of writers’ writing ability at textual level. The process approach regards writing process as acommunicative activity rather than the writers’ personal activity; nevertheless, it neglects the variation in texttypes and writers’ writing proficiency. The genre approach takes the writers’ writing purpose into account andattaches great importance to the rhetorical organization of the whole texts. However, it doesn’t give weight toteaching writing skills and learners seem to be inactive in the class.In order to give full play to the advantages of each of the above three writing approaches, a syntheticteaching model named process-genre approach was put forward by Badger and White from StirlingUniversity in2000. The upholders of this new synthetic approach believe that the essence of writing is ameans of communication constrained by social context and determined by communicative purpose. Bothlinguistic knowledge and writing skills can be acquired in the writing process. This new approach isconsidered to synthesize the strong points and avoid weak points of the above three traditional writingapproaches.In an effort to check the actual effect of applying process-genre approach in EFL writing teaching toEnglish majors, the author conducted a teaching experiment spanning approximately sixteen teaching weeks.The subjects are50third-year English majors of two classes randomly selected from Lanzhou Longqiao College,25of whom are in experimental class and the other25in control class. In the process of the teachingexperiment, the experimental class was taught in process-genre approach while the control class traditionalproduct approach. After the experiment, the scores of pre-test and post-test were analyzed by the SPSSsoftware (version13.0) to see the quantitative difference between the above two classes before and after theteaching experiment.Through careful collecting, counting and analyzing, a positive conclusion was reached that theprocess-genre approach can, to some extent, effectively improve English majors’ EFL writing proficiency;and this synthetic approach is, to some degree, superior to the traditional writing approaches. Gratifyingchanges of EC members’ attitudes towards writing finally occurred.Although this experimental research has achieved the expected results, but there are still such limitationsand inadequacies as choice of subjects and time span. The author hopes more and more EFL writing teacherscan gradually endorse this synthetic approach and utilize it in real writing teaching classes and do morefurther research to refine its teaching procedures to adapt to China’s real conditions of English writingteaching.